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As I have studied the art and craft of making good coffee (seven different brewing devices and counting!), I found cold brew to paradoxically be the most difficult one to nail down. In terms of technique, cold brew is by far the easiest to make — just throw some coffee grounds in water, put it in the fridge, and then after some time take it out and filter out the grounds. No fancy barista skills needed! But unlike other brew methods, which usually had a relatively narrow range of recommendations and a general brewing consensus, cold brew recipes online are all over the place in the following dimensions:
- Ratio of coffee to water
- Brew time (this was the most frustrating, because individual recipes would sometimes say “12-24 hours” which is a huge range that makes a significant impact on the final result)
- Dilution ratio of concentrate to water/creamer
- How to avoid coffee filters getting clogged
During the 2020 lockdowns I invested a lot of time experimenting in these dimensions and finally settled on a recipe I liked. I foolishly didn’t back it up, and after my phone got run over by a truck earlier this summer I was afraid I’d have to recreate the arduous months of experimentation.
Fortunately, I texted friends and family experiment-by-experiment updates and was able to reconstruct the recipe through those messages, so for once my habit of spamming people with minutiae they have limited interest in finally paid off! I recently made the first batch of 2021 with this recipe and upon my first sip I immediately thought “wow, this cold brew slaps!” (when did I become the person who says things “slap”? A mystery for another time…).
Nobody publishing cold brew recipes online knows what they’re doing anyway, so I’m adding mine to the mix. If you’re going to trust the recipe of some random person online, here’s one that at least has some experimentation behind it. It also serves as a convenient way of backing up my recipe in case another truck runs over my phone.
So without further ado, I present Gautam’s Cold Brew Recipe:
Ingredients and Equipment
Brewer: OXO Good Grips 32 Oz Cold Brew Coffee Maker (with the additional paper filters)
Coffee Beans: There doesn’t appear to be any consensus on a roast specifically for cold brew, so use whichever you prefer. My preference in general is lighter or medium-light roasts. Whatever you get, make sure the beans are good quality (I have liked coffee subscriptions from Atlas, Corvus, Sey, and 1000 Faces) and haven’t been sitting around too long. I use Fellow Atmos vacuum-sealed containers to maximize freshness.
Grind: A coarse grind. To get more specific, I use a 35 grind size setting on the Baratza Encore burr grinder.
Ratio: 1:9.6 coffee grounds to water (by weight). In my brewer I use 40 oz of water (~1189g of water) which translates to ~124g of grounds.
Water: Good cold brew water reminds me of the British people I met when I traveled to the UK as a college student: Cold (fridge temperature) and filtered (e.g. Brita jug). The filtered part is especially important, because the chlorine used to treat water in many municipal water systems has a noticeable impact on the taste. Your coffee is almost entirely water, so use tasty H20!
Adjust the above grounds and water based on how much cold brew you plan to make/the capacity of your brewer, making sure to maintain the 1:9.6 ratio.
Instructions
1. Load the brewer with your mesh filter and then a paper filter (the paper filter should be the second layer of filtration after the mesh filter). This setup ensures the final cold brew isn’t silty, and also filter out more of the oils and microfines. The result is a brighter, sweeter cup of coffee (and apparently may reduce the potentially negative effects of coffee on cholesterol, but I haven’t really looked into this much).
2. Add 2/5 of your water to the brew chamber.
3. Add half of your grounds to the water.
4. Add another 2/5 of your water. If you’re using the OXO Cold Brewer like I am, put the lid back over the brew chamber and then pour the water on top of the “rainmaker” in concentric circles to evenly saturate the grounds.
5. Add the other half of the grounds.
6. Add the remainder of the water as you did in step 4. If any grounds don’t look saturated, take a spoon and gently immerse them. Don’t stir too vigorously though! We want to avoid any microfines settling to the bottom and clogging the filter, which is why we layered in the grounds and water rather than dumping them all in at once.
7. Store in the fridge for 16-18 hours. This was the time I found to be optimal; remember that longer brew times will result in stronger, more heavily caffeinated coffee, and shorter brew times in weaker, less heavily caffeinated coffee. Too short a brew time could underextract, leaving the taste too sour; too long a brew time can overextract and leave the taste too bitter.
8. Filter and drain the brew into a carafe through whatever mechanism your brewer has for this. In the OXO brewer this typically takes ~20-30 minutes, but before I learned the layering technique it sometimes would take hours due to the microfines clogging the filter.
9. Your carafe now contains cold brew concentrate, which should be good for a week in the fridge. When serving, serve over ice and dilute it in a 1:1 ratio of concentrate to water or creamer. If it’s still a bit too strong for your liking, you can up the dilution ratio to 2:3 concentrate to water/creamer. Conversely, you can dilute with a 3:2 concentrate to water/creamer ratio if it’s not strong enough.
10. You can be extra like I am and add this cold brew to a nitro keg to make homemade nitro cold brew! This is the keg I have used, along with nitrogen cartridges — I find 2-3 cartridges per batch keeps every cup nice and foamy. (Use the real thing, N2, rather than the many N20 cartridges offered in their place).
